Heather Howell’s husband, the science adviser for East Sussex, left teaching in 1974 but kept his pension contributions in the Teachers’ Superannuation Scheme. Despite one or two hiccups - non-pensionable service in Uganda, for example - he is still going to get a welcome lump sum, plus regular pension, from the TSS when he takes early retirement, aged 60, this summer.

There will be nothing for Mrs Howell, however, whatever time she decides to give up work. Despite 12 years of teaching psychology in further education colleges, there is not a penny in the TSS for her.

Like thousands of other teachers, mostly in the FE sector, she is an hourly-paid worker whose rates of pay have no relationship with any nominal yearly pay scale. Under Teachers’ Pensions Agency rules, that puts her, and thousands of others, outside the pale of pensionable people. Unless an hourly pay rate is expressed as a proportion of an annual salary, the agency will not allow that pay to be treated as pensionable.

Mrs Howell and the teaching unions regard this as unfair. The unfairness was highlighted by a European Court ruling in September last year which said that excluding part-timers from pension schemes was, in effect, sexual discrimination since so many part-timers are women. This should not have been a surprise to either national governments or employers, since the court made exactly the same ruling nearly 20 years ago. Because this ruling was largely ignored then, the court has given part-time employees excluded from pension schemes the right to claim lost pension entitlements since 1976, if their employment goes back that far.

In the light of the European Court ruling, and with many thousands of pounds potentially awaiting collection, teaching unions are planning a broad-front assault by their female part-time worker members on industrial tribunals right around the country, all claiming sex discrimination over their exclusion by their employers and the pension agency from the TSS.

There are, inevitably, some hurdles. The first is that, for sex discrimination to be proved, it will be necessary to show that part-time teachers are more likely to be female, and therefore the burden of exclusion from the TSS falls more heavily on women than men.

However, since colleges are all independent employers now, no one is collecting national figures on the sexual ratios of part-time lecturers.

Another problem is deadlines. Unions were originally told that they had only three months from the European Court announcement on September 28 to get claims of discrimination into industrial tribunals, but it now appears claims made after December 28 may be allowed to proceed. Claims have to be made to the Pensions Ombudsman within three years of retiring, though the pensions Bill now going through Parliament cuts this down to six months.

A third difficulty, and more tricky for most people to overcome, is that in order to get their pension rights backdated if sex discrimination is proved, the victorious part-timers will have to stump up all the superannuation contributions they would have been paying had they been allowed into the TSS from the start. This could be very expensive.

The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers has been getting two to three calls a day from members who feel they may be covered by the European Court ruling, and all callers, if female, have been sent forms to fill in to take their case to an industrial tribunal. About 50 of them have now lodged claims with tribunals. The National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education estimates that 1,200 of its members are affected, and they, too, are being advised to submit claims.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers circulated all its FE members about the European Court ruling, and has sent out “about 200” industrial tribunal applications. However, the ATL’s Marion Bird said the union had received “several hundred” telephone calls from part-time teachers who were not eligible to appeal because their pay was pensionable under existing TPA rules but they had elected not to join the TSS. She said: “They were not ‘pensions-aware’ at the time, and the publicity surrounding the European Court ruling has made them so. They could join the TSS now as part-timers, but they won’t get any retrospective payment.”

All three unions are “exchanging notes” on the situation, and NATFHE will be steering a test case of a female part-timer excluded from the TSS through the tribunal system - a case which will link the Secretary of State for Education to the employer in the alleged discrimination. The unions, and the TPA, are waiting for this test case, which is likely to be binding on all the other tribunals. If the unions do prove indirect discrimination because of the exclusion from the TSS of a group - part-timers - which includes a high proportion of women, then male part-timers will have to be allowed in as well. This is a case in which anti-sex discrimination legislation looks likely to help both sexes.

Meanwhile the unions, the employers and the TPA have a working party trying to work out a satisfactory way of altering the TPA rules to treat part-timers more fairly. According to Brian Clegg, assistant general secretary of the NASUWT, there is “a willingness” to draft new regulations to go before Parliament, and he is optimistic of seeing most part-time teaching work, regardless of how pay is calculated, covered by the TSS “within 12 months”. The main difficulty before the working party, he said, is deciding the minimum amount of service which should count towards a pension.

Whatever is decided, it looks quite likely to be less than the 13 hours a week after which part-time teachers in FE are entitled at present to an associate lectureship, annually-calculated pay and automatic membership, if they want, of the TSS. Since the employer has to pay in to the TSS on behalf of the employee, “mean” colleges are ensuring that most of their part-timers stay below 13 hours a week and thus, until now, out of the TSS, according to Mr Clegg. The knock-on from the European Court ruling looks as if it will remove the attractiveness of keeping part-timers at a maximum of 12 hours a week each. What the effects of that will be, nobody has yet calculated.